The Education Onion

While researching the education situation over the last six plus years I came to understand that our education system resembles an onion. When you finish understanding one layer of problems you realize there is another layer with the same basic smell waiting to be examined.

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Just as an explorer needs markers to find their way,
so do organizations. If you have studied
the Lewis and Clark expedition you will know that Clark was able to chart their
course extremely accurately considering the instruments he had to work
with. I want to share some markers with
respect to organizations and how you can “translate” them into a better
understanding of what they indicate about the organization.

We
can’t hire you because you are overqualified—this statement
has become ubiquitous in many organizations and industry groups. So what does this really mean? Possibilities include;

·We
know that we are a “status quo” organization and you would become quickly bored
or frustrated by the lack of organizational and personal growth potential.

·People
want to be part of a winning team and this team is not one.

·An
organization that espouses this “you are overqualified” statement is in a slow
(or fast) decline in performance and competitiveness.

·If
you are a high powered applicant, be thankful when they tell you that you are
overqualified. That allows you to
conclude that their leadership is weak and you wouldn’t want to work there
anyway.

If
only we could eliminate the unfair competition
or lack of support from . . . –this tells you that
they are more interested in confessing that their poor performance is someone
else’s fault than in facing the reality of their own performance problems. You can only use that argument with a
straight face after you are sure you have perfected your own performance to its
fullest and have no room to improve without removing the impediment you want to
complain about.

We’ve
been in business for decades and see no need to change our process now—this
is a sure indication that this organization is doomed. There is only one constant in the world and
that is change. You either face it taking
it as an opportunity or you are victimized by it.

We
are the best so now we can relax—oops! This reminds me of a story about Mack Trucks
back in the first half of the twentieth century. They had designed a product line that was the
current state of the art and considerably ahead of that of any competitor. They were so confident that they shut down
their design function because they thought no one would ever be able to do
better than they had done. They were
wrong and squandered their lead causing much pain as they tried to restart
development, something they should have kept all along.

We
have a nice work environment because we do not allow arguments or
disagreements—oh, my goodness, this is political
correctness run amok. Bossidy and Charan
in their best selling management book Execution,
the discipline of getting things done discuss the need for “robust dialog”
if you aspire to creating a “performance” organization. What they are saying is that you must allow and
encourage people to disagree vigorously so that the “truth” needed for good
decisions, is exposed. Organizations
that suppress the truth through political correctness and its brother Group
Think are doomed to poor performance because their “be nice” ethic suppresses
the lifeblood (truth) they need to succeed.

As
a successful manager of high performing teams I can say that the first one; we
can’t hire you because you are overqualified is the most ridiculous to me. When I had an opening I looked for the best
qualified person I could find, even someone who could compete with me and
perhaps beat me out. You need strong
people to perform well and hiring the best gives you the opportunity to grow
the organization quickly to the point where even the “overqualified” need to
grow with it. A good definition of the
duty of a leader is, “A leader is
responsible to provide a work climate in which everyone has a chance to grow
and mature as individuals, as members of a group by satisfying their own needs,
while working for the success of the organization.”

Too,
the truth suppression of political correctness and Group Think guarantee an
organization will not be able to perform well.
Kill them both; RIP. Is the goal
to be nice or to perform the mission at an excellent level? You can’t have both all of the time. You can be nice much of the time but there
are times when you can’t if you want to perform. I remember stories of Jimmy David the
defensive back for the Detroit Lions championship teams of the 1950s. His teammates told of hating him in practice
because he was so hardnosed in his tackling. But they also said they loved him
in the games when he made great plays regularly. If you don’t practice with passion you can’t
perform with passion.

Keep
these markers in mind when assessing an organization to work for, invest in or
buy a product or service from.

Thursday, February 9, 2012

The Obama administration has given
10 states a waiver from the federal law known as No Child Left Behind -- once a
bipartisan hope to raise education standards, but now generally regarded as too
cumbersome and draconian.

The White House announced the first
round of waivers for 10 states Thursday morning. The administration had said
that it would grant the waivers because efforts to revise the 10-year-old law
have become bogged down in Congress even though members of both political
parties agree that the law has problems and is in need of major changes.

“After waiting far too long for
Congress to reform No Child Left Behind, my administration is giving states the
opportunity to set higher, more honest standards in exchange for more
flexibility,” President Obama said in a statement released with the
announcement.

“Today, we’re giving 10 states the
green light to continue making reforms that are best for them. Because if we’re
serious about helping our children reach their potential, the best ideas aren’t
going to come from Washington alone. Our job is to harness those ideas, and to
hold states and schools accountable for making them work.”

First, let’s look at the No Child
Left Behind act requirements. Basically,
the law required states to show that they had reached 100% proficiency by
2014. This requirement was for ALL
students, including the “Gap” children (minority and poor). Because the law’s framers wanted to be able
to take corrective action along the way they called for annual achievement
testing to show that at least a linear projection of the progress to get to the
goal in 2014 was met or exceeded. This
annual requirement was termed AYP (Annual Yearly Progress). The consequences for not meeting the AYP
consistently could be many but at the top they meant that the state would take
over the school, fire all the staff and start over. The law did have one gigantic flaw. It allowed each state to define proficiency
for its students, irregardless of how that matched up with the National
Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) or the standards of our best foreign competitors. As you would expect that has led many of the
states to adopt “weak” definitions of proficiency. And in fact you can safely say that all
states fall far short of the international competition and short of the NAEP
requirements.

Now it is true that educators
consider the requirements of No Child Left Behind to be draconian and
cumbersome as the LA Times article mentions.
Educators are consistent in stubbornly refusing to embrace the changes
needed to really solve our education problems.
Of course, they are very comfortable with the status quo in an education
system that is run for the benefit of the adults who work there, not the
students. They are expert at “playing”
the system to get a continuing, ever-increasing flow of money to support new
initiatives which preserve the status quo.
These always fit the “trying to do the wrong thing better”
category. That is, the weakness of our
system is not that it isn’t being worked correctly, it is that the system
itself can’t work which is why improvements of the scale needed are never
achieved on a broad scale. You have to
hand it to our educators for their ability to ignore the facts that all of the
countries who beat us in achievement use a different system.

Sadly it is the one we used to use
in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries before John Dewey and the
Progressives began to take control of our education establishment. Their
approach was dumbed down and much less rigorous in teacher training. The takeover was complete by the late 1960s
when all high school graduates had essentially been exposed to the new system
for their entire school career.
Consistent with that time frame SAT scores plummeted. To fix the problem requires going back to the
rigor of curriculum and teacher preparation that existed before. You will hear from educators that the current
teacher training is more than what was required in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. It is true that
teachers back then were typically trained in Normal schools which gave two to
three years of training after high school to prepare teachers. Today all teachers require at least a
bachelors (4 year) degree from an education school to be certified. There are alternative certification routes
but they amount to very small portion of all teachers.

The problem with the new teacher
training is that it takes the majority of students from the bottom third of
their high school graduating class and transforms them into all A
students. The ed school diploma (with a
few exceptions like U of Virginia and Hillsdale College) is only indicative of “tuition
paid and seat time” in the ed school diploma mill. The main reason our ed system does not change
to what works is that their human resource; teachers and administrators are all
untrained to do it right. That is they
have virtually no subject knowledge and the administrators tasked to lead do
not know how as they have weak ed school training and no role models once at
work to learn how to do it well. Thus,
to employ the techniques that work so well for our foreign competitors and
their students would require a complete retreading of the current
workforce. Also, the need to set high
standards for certification would mean that not all teachers or administrators
could or would be able to pass muster. A
daunting task to be sure. However, the
current “reduce standards if they bind” approach does nothing to fix our broken
education system.

At times like this, I always hear
examples of kids who are brilliant and are products of our education
system. That is true. They tend to fit into those who have parents,
tutors or other support systems to fill the void between what they need and
what the schools provide. It is
fortunate that some students learn in spite of the schools. It does nothing however to provide the
training that the majority of kids need in today’s knowledge society to allow
them to find decent paying jobs. Thus,
actions like today’s taken by the administration only continue pushing the day
the kids are finally served well into the distant future.

Sunday, January 22, 2012

I am posting this article from the Hillsdale College Imprimis because it addresses a problem we need to face.

January 2012

Charles
Murray
American Enterprise Institute

Charles
Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He
received his B.A. in history at Harvard University and his Ph.D. in political
science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has written for
numerous newspapers and journals, including the Washington Post,
the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Weekly
Standard, Commentary, and National Review. His books
include Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980, What
It Means to Be a Libertarian, and Real Education: Four Simple
Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality. His new book, Coming
Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, will be published at the end
of January.

The
following is adapted from a speech delivered in Atlanta, Georgia, on October
28, 2011, at a conference on “Markets, Government, and the Common Good,”
sponsored by Hillsdale College’s Center for the Study of Monetary Systems and
Free Enterprise.

THE CASE
FOR the Department of Education could rest on one or more of three legs: its
constitutional appropriateness, the existence of serious problems in education
that could be solved only at the federal level, and/or its track record since
it came into being. Let us consider these in order.

(1) Is
the Department of Education constitutional?

At the
time the Constitution was written, education was not even considered a function
of local government, let alone the federal government. But the shakiness of the
Department of Education’s constitutionality goes beyond that. Article 1,
Section 8 of the Constitution enumerates the things over which Congress has the
power to legislate. Not only does the list not include education, there is no
plausible rationale for squeezing education in under the commerce clause. I’m
sure the Supreme Court found a rationale, but it cannot have been plausible.

On a
more philosophical level, the framers of America’s limited government had a
broad allegiance to what Catholics call the principle of subsidiarity. In the
secular world, the principle of subsidiarity means that local government should
do only those things that individuals cannot do for themselves, state
government should do only those things that local governments cannot do, and
the federal government should do only those things that the individual states
cannot do. Education is something that individuals acting alone and
cooperatively can do, let alone something local or state governments can do.

I should
be explicit about my own animus in this regard. I don’t think the Department of
Education is constitutionally legitimate, let alone appropriate. I would favor
abolishing it even if, on a pragmatic level, it had improved American
education. But I am in a small minority on that point, so let’s move on to the
pragmatic questions.

(2) Are
there serious problems in education that can be solved only at the federal
level?

The
first major federal spending on education was triggered by the launch of the
first space satellite, Sputnik, in the fall of 1957, which created a perception
that the United States had fallen behind the Soviet Union in science and
technology. The legislation was specifically designed to encourage more
students to go into math and science, and its motivation is indicated by its
title: The National Defense Education Act of 1958. But what really ensnared the
federal government in education in the 1960s had its origins elsewhere—in civil
rights. The Supreme Court declared segregation of the schools unconstitutional
in 1954, but—notwithstanding a few highly publicized episodes such as the
integration of Central High School in Little Rock and James Meredith’s
admission to the University of Mississippi—the pace of change in the next
decade was glacial.

Was it
necessary for the federal government to act? There is a strong argument for
“yes,” especially in the case of K-12 education. Southern resistance to
desegregation proved to be both stubborn and effective in the years followingBrown
v. Board of Education. Segregation of the
schools had been declared unconstitutional, and constitutional rights were
being violated on a massive scale. But the question at hand is whether we need
a Department of Education now, and we have seen a typical evolution of policy.
What could have been justified as a one-time, forceful effort to end violations
of constitutional rights, lasting until the constitutional wrongs had been
righted, was transmuted into a permanent government establishment.
Subsequently, this establishment became more and more deeply involved in
American education for purposes that have nothing to do with constitutional
rights, but instead with a broader goal of improving education.

The
reason this came about is also intimately related to the civil rights movement.
Over the same years that school segregation became a national issue, the
disparities between black and white educational attainment and test scores came
to public attention. When the push for President Johnson’s Great Society
programs began in the mid-1960s, it was inevitable that the federal government
would attempt to reduce black-white disparities, and it did so in 1965 with the
passage of two landmark bills—the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and
the Higher Education Act. The Department of Education didn’t come into being
until 1980, but large-scale involvement of the federal government in education
dates from 1965.

(3) So
what is the federal government’s track record in education?

The most
obvious way to look at the track record is the long-term trend data of the
National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Consider, for instance, the
results for the math test for students in fourth, eighth and twelfth grades
from 1978 through 2004. The good news is that the scores for fourth graders
showed significant improvement in both reading and math—although those gains
diminished slightly as the children got older. The bad news is that the
baseline year of 1978 represents the nadir of the test score decline from the
mid-1960s through the 1970s. Probably we are today about where we were in math
achievement in the 1960s. For reading, the story is even bleaker. The small
gains among fourth graders diminish by eighth grade and vanish by the twelfth
grade. And once again, the baseline tests in the 1970s represent a nadir.

From
1942 through the 1990s, the state of Iowa administered a consistent and
comprehensive test to all of its public school students in grade school, middle
school, and high school—making it, to my knowledge, the only state in the union
to have good longitudinal data that go back that far. The Iowa Test of Basic
Skills offers not a sample, but an entire state population of students. What
can we learn from a single state? Not much, if we are mainly interested in the
education of minorities—Iowa from 1942 through 1970 was 97 percent white, and
even in the 2010 census was 91 percent white. But, paradoxically, that racial
homogeneity is also an advantage, because it sidesteps all the complications
associated with changing ethnic populations.

Since
retention through high school has changed greatly over the last 70 years, I
will consider here only the data for ninth graders. What the data show is that
when the federal government decided to get involved on a large scale in K-12
education in 1965, Iowa’s education had been improving substantially since the
first test was administered in 1942. There is reason to think that the same
thing had been happening throughout the country. As I documented in my book,Real
Education, collateral data from other
sources are not as detailed, nor do they go back to the 1940s, but they tell a
consistent story. American education had been improving since World War II.
Then, when the federal government began to get involved, it got worse.

I will
not try to make the case that federal involvement caused the downturn. The
effort that went into programs associated with the Elementary and Secondary
Education Act of 1965 in the early years was not enough to have changed
American education, and the more likely causes for the downturn are the spirit
of the 1960s—do your own thing—and the rise of progressive education to
dominance over American public education. But this much can certainly be said:
The overall data on the performance of American K-12 students give no reason to
think that federal involvement, which took the form of the Department of
Education after 1979, has been an engine of improvement.

What
about the education of the disadvantaged, especially minorities? After all,
this was arguably the main reason that the federal government began to get
involved in education—to reduce the achievement gap separating poor children
and rich children, and especially the gap separating poor black children and
the rest of the country.

The most
famous part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was Title I,
initially authorizing more than a billion dollars annually (equivalent to more
than $7 billion today) to upgrade the schools attended by children from
low-income families. The program has continued to grow ever since, disposing of
about $19 billion in 2010 (No Child Left Behind has also been part of Title I).

Supporters
of Title I confidently expected to see progress, and so formal evaluation of
Title I was built into the legislation from the beginning. Over the years, the
evaluations became progressively more ambitious and more methodologically
sophisticated. But while the evaluations have improved, the story they tell has
not changed. Despite being conducted by people who wished the program well, no
evaluation of Title I from the 1970s onward has found credible evidence of a
significant positive impact on student achievement. If one steps back from the
formal evaluations and looks at the NAEP test score gap between high-poverty
schools (the ones that qualify for Title I support) and low-poverty schools,
the implications are worse. A study by the Department of Education published in
2001 revealed that the gap grew rather than diminished from 1986—the earliest
year such comparisons have been made—through 1999.

That
brings us to No Child Left Behind. Have you noticed that no one talks about No
Child Left Behind any more? The explanation is that its one-time advocates are
no longer willing to defend it. The nearly-flat NAEP trendlines since 2002 make
that much-ballyhooed legislative mandate—a mandate to bring all children to
proficiency in math and reading by 2014—too embarrassing to mention.

In
summary: the long, intrusive, expensive role of the federal government in K-12
education does not have any credible evidence for a positive effect on American
education.

* * *

I have
chosen to focus on K-12 because everyone agrees that K-12 education leaves much
to be desired in this country and that it is reasonable to hold the
government’s feet to the fire when there is no evidence that K-12 education has
improved. When we turn to post-secondary education, there is much less agreement
on first principles.

The
bachelor of arts degree as it has evolved over the last half-century has become
the work of the devil. It is now a substantively meaningless piece of
paper—genuinely meaningless, if you don’t know where the degree was obtained
and what courses were taken. It is expensive, too, as documented by the College
Board: Public four-year colleges average about $7,000 per year in tuition, not
including transportation, housing, and food. Tuition at the average private
four-year college is more than $27,000 per year. And yet the B.A. has become
the minimum requirement for getting a job interview for millions of jobs, a
cost-free way for employers to screen for a certain amount of IQ and
perseverance. Employers seldom even bother to check grades or courses, being
able to tell enough about a graduate just by knowing the institution that he or
she got into as an 18-year-old.

So what
happens when a paper credential is essential for securing a job interview, but
that credential can be obtained by taking the easiest courses and doing the
minimum amount of work? The result is hundreds of thousands of college students
who go to college not to get an education, but to get a piece of paper. When
the dean of one East Coast college is asked how many students are in his
institution, he likes to answer, “Oh, maybe six or seven.” The situation at his
college is not unusual. The degradation of American college education is not a
matter of a few parents horrified at stories of silly courses, trivial study
requirements, and campus binge drinking. It has been documented in detail,
affects a large proportion of the students in colleges, and is a disgrace.

The
Department of Education, with decades of student loans and scholarships for
university education, has not just been complicit in this evolution of the B.A.
It has been its enabler. The size of these programs is immense. In 2010, the
federal government issued new loans totaling $125 billion. It handed out more
than eight million Pell Grants totaling more than $32 billion dollars. Absent
this level of intervention, the last three decades would have seen a much
healthier evolution of post-secondary education that focused on concrete job
credentials and courses of studies not constricted by the traditional model of
the four-year residential college. The absence of this artificial subsidy would
also have let market forces hold down costs. Defenders of the Department of
Education can unquestionably make the case that its policies have increased the
number of people going to four-year residential colleges. But I view that as
part of the Department of Education’s indictment, not its defense.

* * *

What
other case might be made for federal involvement in education? Its
contributions to good educational practice? Think of the good things that have
happened to education in the last 30 years—the growth of homeschooling and the
invention and spread of charter schools. The Department of Education had
nothing to do with either development. Both happened because of the initiatives
taken by parents who were disgusted with standard public education and took
matters into their own hands. To watch the process by which charter schools are
created, against the resistance of school boards and administrators, is to
watch the best of American traditions in operation. Government has had nothing
to do with it, except as a drag on what citizens are trying to do for their
children.

Think of
the best books on educational practice, such as Howard Gardner’s many
innovative writings and E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Curriculum, developed
after his landmark book,Cultural Literacy,
was published in 1987. None of this came out of the Department of Education.
The Department of Education spends about $200 million a year on research
intended to improve educational practice. No evidence exists that these
expenditures have done any significant good.

As far
as I can determine, the Department of Education has no track record of positive
accomplishment—nothing in the national numbers on educational achievement,
nothing in the improvement of educational outcomes for the disadvantaged,
nothing in the advancement of educational practice. It just spends a lot of
money. This brings us to the practical question: If the Department of Education
disappeared from next year’s budget, would anyone notice? The only reason that
anyone would notice is the money. The nation’s public schools have developed a
dependence on the federal infusion of funds. As a practical matter, actually
doing away with the Department of Education would involve creating block grants
so that school district budgets throughout the nation wouldn’t crater.

Sadly,
even that isn’t practical. The education lobby will prevent any serious inroads
on the Department of Education for the foreseeable future. But the answer to
the question posed in the title of this talk—“Do we need the Department of
Education?”—is to me unambiguous: No.

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

CNBC reported this morning that Kodak had been given notice
that it wasn’t in compliance with the stock price rules of the New York Stock
Exchange. Kodak is currently selling for
less than $1 per share. This is
continuing evidence of a long slide for Kodak as digital technology has
replaced its film-centric technology.
Yes, Kodak has participated in digital products but was ill prepared by
its focus on film technology to switch horses effectively. Basically, entities have great difficulty
dealing with change. The only thing that
“helps” them do it is competition. Thus,
a former strong company that was part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average years
ago is trundling slowly toward oblivion already achieving insignificant status
in today’s economy. Should we be sad? No, the meritocratic system that is
Capitalism weeds out the uncompetitive to make room for the competitive. Consumers benefit because they have a better
technology at their disposal at a much cheaper price point. More jobs are created in the new
technology.

To reference the title of this piece, Too Big to Fail, Too Little to Save, Kodak has withered away to a
point where it is too little to save and so the government did not intervene to
keep an unproductive entity alive. If
they had done so as they have in other areas recently they would have added to
the cost but not the benefit to society as a whole. Letting uncompetitive entities fail and
perhaps rise from the ashes recast for success is a natural and positive
development. Sure, there is short term
pain involved but it is far, far less than the total pain and cost to society
when government steps in and creates a “walking dead” situation that wanders
zombie-like forever, as a net drag on our economy when we can ill afford it.

The biggest failed enterprise being propped up by the government
is our education system. It is less competitive
by far than Kodak yet is still consuming huge resources. It does not educate our children well enough
to compete in the global marketplace for high paying jobs. While there is some domestic competition for
education; private and charter schools and even home schooling, the education
establishment has been very successful in limiting school choice for the
majority of the children nationally.
Thus, with no competition, our century old “Model T” education system
continues to be “improved” but the underlying chassis is still the same
uncompetitive Model T. Also, in truth,
what domestic competition exists is basically using the same failed education
philosophies as used in the mainline schools.
There are exceptions but far too few.
When compared to the more modern and perfected education processes of
the countries beating us so badly on international achievement testing our
system should have been killed and replaced decades ago.

Treating our education system as too big to fail is damaging
our society as a whole. It does reduce
the short term pain for education fiefdom members and suppliers but can’t be
justified because it harms our kids and nation far more than the reduced pain
to our coddled educators is worth. Let educators
compete by accessing government money only tied to real performance
improvement. This must be results based
not activity based. Educators have shown
great mastery of “looking like they are doing positive things” while continuing
the same old harmful processes.

The education emperor has no clothes. Someone who is as delusional as that deserves
to fail and be replaced. But we should
give them a chance to change but it must be on a short leash, i.e. tied to
specific and immediate improvement. It
is commonly said by educators that change is hard and takes a long time. That is not at all true. If your feet are in the fire you move, you
don’t let them roast.

A good example of what is possible is what happened after
Pearl Harbor. A highly bureaucratized
military suddenly threw the “book” out the window making greater progress in
months than had been made in decades before that. It became a truly merit-based system
overnight. There was no tolerance for
the old ways of patronage and who someone knew.
When survival is at stake positive action happens naturally. We need to threaten the survival of the
current failed education system if we expect positive change.

Friday, November 4, 2011

In the article Francesca Duffy reports on a
Washington meeting this week where Biggs and Richwine (researchers at the
American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation ) reported on their
findings that on average teachers make 52% more than workers with equivalent
skills make in the private sector considering pay, benefits and job security. They totally demolished Arne Duncan,
Education Secretary’s assertion that teachers are “desperately underpaid.” I am really surprised that the researchers
made it out of town without suffering harm.

The researchers reckon that the overpayment
nationwide amounts to $120 Billion a year.
This puts it in the same ballpark as the savings the “super committee”
is tasked to find in the federal spending over ten years. Yes, it is hard to take away something that
people are used to getting but in this case it is both unfair and
unaffordable. This is why a focus of the
discussion was to promote the idea that states facing budget shortfalls should
consider teacher compensation as a viable area for spending cuts.

While this could be a fruitful area and could start
addressing the unfairness to society of the current situation, we know from the
states (Wisconsin et al) where even small changes in what teachers pay for
healthcare or retirement plan contributions are attempted that it will require
a lot guts on the part of state lawmakers with majority public support to make
it happen.

Richwine
contended that the standard regression method, which compares teachers to
workers with equivalent education and finds that teachers are underpaid, is
flawed because it doesn't consider "unobservable ability." People
going into teaching have lower SAT and GRE scores than people who pursue other
fields, he said. Thus, in the case of teachers, "years of education could
be an overestimate of cognitive skills." In addition, the education major
itself is not as rigorous as other fields of study. Thus, this adds to the recognition of education
outsiders over decades that an education degree is of extremely low value
compared to other degree paths. It is
essentially a “seat time” certificate. For
decades those who fail in other college majors switch to education and become “A”
students easily and those who can’t get admitted to more rigorous studies start
out in education from day one.

This
doesn’t mean that all educators are uneducated but the majority certainly
are. They set the tone for the whole
endeavor making any improvement virtually impossible as has been proven over
decades. An example of critiques of the
education schools and their graduates is Gary Lyons article in Texas Magazine,
Sept. 1979. Lyons
reported that half of the teacher applicants to the Houston Independent School
District scored lower in math and a third of them lower in English than the
average high school junior and he blamed the state’s sixty-three accredited
teacher-training institutions for turning out “teachers who cannot read as well
as the average sixteen-year old, write notes free of barbarisms to parents, or
handle arithmetic well enough to keep track of the field-trip money.” He accused the teacher colleges of coddling
ignorance and, “backed by hometown legislators,” of turning out “hordes of
certified ignoramuses whose incompetence in turn becomes evidence that the
teacher colleges and the educators need yet more money and more power.”

Arthur Levine, then president of Columbia Teachers
College (when he wrote his reports) in his three part critique of education
schools starting with Educating School Leaders in 2005 reinforced Lyons’
criticisms of 26 years earlier. He
pointed out the low SAT and GRE scores but also that administrators as a group
had lower SAT and GRE scores than the teachers they were “leading.” He also bemoaned the lack of rigor as being
related to universities, even those with good reputations, using education
schools as a low quality diploma mill with lowering standards and admission
requirements to support the levels of income needed to fund more important career
majors at the universities.

Back to the new research: They found that when teachers and other
workers are compared by cognitive ability, Richwine added, "the wage
penalty has essentially disappeared."
Also, their research showed that when teachers left teaching to take
private sector jobs their pay declined by 3%.
Of course, the party line of the teachers unions is that teachers are
constantly tempted by higher pay in the private sector, which is perhaps true
for some teachers but not for the average teacher.

It
should be no surprise that the biggest component of the overpaid reality lies
with the extremely generous benefits that teachers receive which are not
available in the private sector. Fully
funded retirement plans with defined benefit amounts unattainable without
taxpayer subsidies because the market return assumptions are unrealistic are
typically fully funded by the public.
Also, healthcare costs are extremely low and the retirement healthcare
benefits are also very expensive to the public but virtually free for the
teachers.

I
believe that this “free ride” on the taxpayer’s dime is unsustainable and
unproductive. It contributes to a view
of things within education circles that is totally unrealistic. It results in false sense of entitlement
related to believing the conventional wisdoms of educators. That is, “we are doing a great job and are
working incredibly hard.” Norman
Augustine in his “Is America Falling Off the Flat Earth?” points out that if
American educators adopted a goal to be “average” in the global education
panacea they would need to improve a lot.
The reality is that our education system is performing abysmally and the
amount we spend on it is not helping at all.
The payback on investment is atrocious.
Worse though is that millions of kids are given “amputated” futures year
after year because educators live in a dream world with no sense of reality or
responsibility while their enablers the education schools and too many
politicians find benefit in continuing the scam.

Friday, October 7, 2011

The death of Steve Jobs is on everyone’s mind this
week.The accolades for his leadership
and creative genius at Apple are everywhere in the media.The accolades are appropriate because of the
results he turned in over his career.I
think it is very worthwhile to look at the “whole person” who was so successful
and learn from it.

Steve’s reputation was that he was a very smart and driven
person.That was characterized by his
extremely high expectations for himself and the organization he led coupled
with a passion for excellence.From what
you can piece together from comments now but especially over the years when
people were discussing a living and not a dead man paint a picture of a
difficult person to have as a boss.More than one person who worked with him has
said he did not suffer fools at all.He
also did not suffer in silence when confronted with what he saw as work that
did not meet his standard.His feedback
in such circumstances was swift and biting.He created a work environment where political correctness had no
place.Perhaps above all he understood
the technology and what it could and couldn’t do at the current time or the
short term future.This objective and
realistic but stretching view of what was possible led Apple to success after
success.

So let’s compare the Job’s approach to management with that
employed by our education “leaders.”

·Results - our education system is turning in
results as abysmal as Job’s results were positive.

·Expectations – educators do not have high
expectations of themselves or of their students.

·Objectivity – educators continue to use
education approaches which are technically wrong in spite of the results they
aren’t able to achieve.This is compared
to competitor nations who use technically sound approaches and teach their kids
much more effectively as is shown by the international testing. The approach in our education system is to
try to do the wrong thing better when they should stop doing the wrong things
and start doing the right things.

·Work environment – in education political
correctness and group think run amok.This creates a workplace where constructive feedback (that is, you are
not getting the right results, shape up or ship out) simply does not
occur.Kids and our increasingly
uncompetitive society globally continue to pay the price.

·Mental Toughness – Job’s created an environment
of mental toughness where robust dialog was encouraged as a way to perfect the
quality of the work teams.The education
environment is one of people walking on eggshells because conflict is not
allowed and thus creates a bunch of wimps.

·Passion – in education passion is not allowed
because it might lead to conflicts.Conflict
is required if you want to really perform well.It results in much better decisions.Oh, people “say” they are passionate about things but it is all a
charade.If passion for doing the
education mission in an excellent way were ever allowed to break through the
educations fiefdom’s fortress walls it would have a remarkably positive impact.

Therefore, we must conclude that there are good reasons why
Steve Jobs and Apple were successful and equally valid reasons why our
education system is a miserable failure compared to the money spent and the
quality of the kids who have far more potential than they are given credit
for.

Sunday, September 11, 2011

The history of American mainstream education for nearly the last five decades has been characterized by lots of changes but no significant improvement in our performance versus the best global competition. In fact they are improving steadily at a pace that even if we improve will leave us further behind year after year. The changes we have pursued have been;
• Greatly increased costs
o Admin increases have been huge in both numbers of people and the pay they receive.
o Advanced ‘education school’ graduate degrees have become ubiquitous. This is because districts have policies in place that give people who get the advanced degree an automatic pay increase. For example; Arthur Levine (former president of Columbia Teachers College) wrote in his 2005 Educating School Leaders that the education doctorate “had no value for any public school administration job.”
o The ancillary “trappings” that used to be very rare are now “necessary” so that schools are more and more expensive to build and maintain. The husk is beautiful but the core is rotten.
o Massive amounts of money are spent on “doing the wrong things better” which is much more expensive and only preserves the unacceptable status quo of poor performance. Terms such as best practice, special education, response to intervention, etc. all fit the “do the wrong thing better” approach.

• States generally set low proficiency standards and the national level NAEP testing which has a more rigorous standard than the states also is set below the global best competition by 2-3 grades and sometimes more.

• The best performing global competitors use a rigorous, direct instruction process taught by teachers who have robust subject knowledge. Our education philosophy is to use the discovery/constructivist approach championed by Dewey et al about a century ago. Our performance cannot improve significantly unless we discard the dumbed-down constructivist approach and replace it with the direct instruction process. This will require ‘retreading’ teachers in both subject knowledge which is currently weak but also in pedagogy which is currently tailored to the constructivist process that E.D. Hirsch says “hasn’t worked and can’t work” because it is technically flawed.

• The political climate has increasingly moved toward more state and federal control and less local control over the education process. This added bureaucracy only serves to increase costs and cast the current technically flawed process in concrete so that needed change is extremely difficult.

• Education entities have essentially transformed themselves into propaganda operations whose main objective is to ‘con’ the public into believing that they are doing as well as can be expected but more money to spend would always help the kids.

With all of that it is easy to see why educators take the comfortable and easy road of ignoring (masking) their performance in the core mission to educate children to their potential.
However, just suppose for the thought of it that some brave district leadership team decided to work on the real issues impeding education performance. It isn’t likely but just suppose it did happen. What process might they use to travel the road to self-respect and satisfaction in tackling a difficult task and succeeding?

A good first step would be to put out a press release and parent, patron, and staff letter to inform everyone of the truth of the district’s poor performance and also that they were committed to fixing the problems as soon as possible. This could be considered analogous to Cortez’ burning of ships to prevent his men from feeling that retreat to Cuba was an option. Their only option was to go forward or die. That brave district would inform everyone that the ways of operating would be very different than they had been in the past.

The days of milling around trying to avoid making a decision that might cause painful but productive change would be past. The focus would be on implementation of “technically correct” education processes. There is absolutely no need to discuss, experiment or go slow, what needs to be done is well known. The other countries whose kids get much better educations than ours do have proven what works, we only need to implement their good practice.

A specific outline of actions to take immediately no matter what part of the school year you are in;
• Immediately start rigorous subject matter training for teachers. Start with elementary teachers who as a group have the most to learn. Concentrate on math and reading first. This training cannot come from education school faculty. They don’t have the knowledge required as is shown by the poor subject knowledge of education school graduates.

• Immediately discontinue all constructivist curricula. Replace all texts currently in use with more rigorous material. For example, the Singapore math texts are cheap and much better than the commonly used EveryDay Math which does not provide the foundation required for success in middle and high school math studies.

• Immediately train district leaders to be competent change leaders. Education school training and the leadership role models all work to create maintainers not “change masters” as Rosabeth Kanter called them in her book The Change Masters.

• Eliminate political correctness and Group Think as they stand in the way of robust dialogue, a primary requirement for performance organizations.

• Value honesty in identifying problems. Do not allow a “kill the messenger” approach. You must face the bald-faced truth of your performance no matter how uncomfortable if you hope to make real progress.

• Report often to stakeholders about progress being made.

• Stop paying more for advanced degrees. If the advanced degree results in better performance then pay more for that performance, if not, do not pay more. This was recommended by Arthur Levine in Educating School Leaders.

• Use a short-cycle, data driven, prioritized management process.

Is there just one district out there that has the integrity and honesty to face and fix the problems so that all kids can actually have the opportunity to learn to their potential?

About Me

Paul Richardson
born and raised in rural Michigan near the state capital, Lansing. Attended one room school through 6th grade. Earned BSEE from Michigan State and MSE(EE) from U of Michigan.
Moved to Colorado Springs in 1970 and except for a 2 and a half year time in Rockland County New York has lived here since.
Interests include photography, history, hiking in the mountains, family, esp. grandkids.